Developers lose an average of three hours each week to tool failures, outages and workflow glitches — adding up to nearly a month of lost productivity every year.
From missed deadlines to burnout from constant troubleshooting, the Lokalise survey of 500 U.S. developers revealed recurring disruptions are quietly undermining developer efficiency and team velocity across the country.
With an average developer salary of $100,000, that amounts to about $8,000 in lost productivity per developer annually. Nearly half (44%) said they had missed a deadline because of a technical issue, and more than 60% admitted to spending regular time troubleshooting instead of coding.
“When 44% of developers miss deadlines because a tool failed, that’s not user error, it’s a system failure,” says Jorge Martins, senior director of engineering at Lokalise.
He explains that measuring developer experience (DX) means tracking time lost, not just output.
“How long does onboarding take? How often are devs waiting on support or stuck in broken flows? Surveys and shadowing help uncover blockers you won’t see in metrics alone,” he says.
Balodis says organizations should treat DX like an operational metric, and they’ll be able to cut waste, move faster, and keep their best engineers around.
The problem goes beyond individual productivity. Many developers act as informal IT support for their teams, with 61% saying they regularly handle troubleshooting tasks not in their job description.
These ad hoc support efforts add up to roughly three hours a week per developer — again, nearly 20 workdays per year lost to non-core work. Top issues included networking and connectivity problems (48%), permissions and access issues (35%), and tool setup or configuration (34%).
Despite these recurring challenges, only 16% of developers said they received adequate training or documentation to address technical issues, while one-third reported receiving no support at all.
About 32% felt their managers underestimated how much time was wasted on internal support and tooling inefficiencies.
Beyond coding, developers also reported spending significant time on administrative tasks (43%), tool setup (39%), onboarding new colleagues (35%), and DevOps duties outside their roles (19%).
Martins says the findings highlight a persistent fragmentation in development environments that platform engineering aims to solve—by standardizing toolchains, improving automation, and eliminating repetitive, manual setup.
“The goal isn’t just fixing problems, it’s building systems that don’t break in the first place,” he says.
Martins pointed out that only 16% of developers surveyed say they’ve had proper training or docs for the issues they deal with, while a third haven’t had any.
“That’s not just a gap, it’s a red flag,” he warns. “Good documentation should live where the work happens, stay version-controlled, and have clear owners.”
By adding lightweight training, searchable help portals and regular onboarding refreshers, organizations can turn internal tools from slowdowns into speed boosts.
“Distributed teams don’t get quick fixes,” he says. “You can’t just ask the person next to you when something breaks.”
Martins explains nearly half of developers say they’ve pretended to be “in a meeting” just to recover from tool failures–that’s how draining these issues are.
“Platform engineering helps by automating known pain points, documenting fixes, and building workflows that don’t rely on tribal knowledge,” he says. “In async teams, a strong internal platform isn’t a bonus, it’s how you stay fast.”
The report also analyzed search trends across all 50 U.S. states, finding that developers in Washington, Vermont and Massachusetts made the most troubleshooting-related Google searches per capita, suggesting regional differences in infrastructure maturity and tooling support.